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"In this post, award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York raises some new questions about the Common Core State Standards and curriculum being developed around them."

"New scores from standardized tests   aligned with the Common Core State Standards were released earlier this month in New York, and, as expected, the number of students who did well plummeted. This decline was predicted by New York State officials. How did they know? Here to explain in an eye-opening piece is award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York, who has for more than a year chronicled on the test-driven reform in her state"

"King and Tisch seem determined to destroy public confidence in public education, to demoralize teachers and principals, and to crush students' love of learning by making testing the only consequential aspect of their schooling."

"Dear Governor Christie, Yesterday I took the opportunity to come hear you speak on your campaign trail. I have never really heard you speak before except for sound bytes that I get on my computer. I don't have cable, I don't read newspapers. I don't have enough time. I am a public school teacher that works an average of 60 hours a week in my building. Yes, you can check with my principal. I run the after-school program along with my my classroom position. I do even more work when I am at home. For verification of this, just ask my children. I asked you one simple question yesterday. I wanted to know why you portray NJ Public Schools as failure factories. Apparently that question struck a nerve. When you swung around at me and raised your voice, asking me what I wanted, my first response "I want more money for my students." Notice, I did not ask for more money for me. I did not ask for my health benefits, my pension, a raise, my tenure, or even my contract that I have not had for nearly three years. "

This is the intro to links to the following articles: A Dangerous Obsession Linda Darling-Hammond Avoiding the Poverty Issue Paul Thomas Costly, But Worth It Marcus Winters Wasting More Money Molly Putnam One Factor Among Many Kevin Carey Trust Principals, Not Tests Michael Petrilli Too Much For Tests to Bear Clara Hemphill

"Here's the letter that 10 assessment experts sent to the New York State Board of Regents earlier this month urging it not to approve a system that links student standard test scores to the evaluations of teachers and principals."

"The e-mail box runneth over with bad tidings. Teachers are reporting that cheating is rampant in New York City schools -- and they claim principals are the culprits. "

"The Montgomery County Public Schools system here has a highly regarded program for evaluating teachers, providing them extra support if they are performing poorly and getting rid of those who do not improve. The program, Peer Assistance and Review - known as PAR - uses several hundred senior teachers to mentor both newcomers and struggling veterans. If the mentoring does not work, the PAR panel - made up of eight teachers and eight principals - can vote to fire the teacher. "

"...I worry about the one-sided treatment of education issues, not only in Rhode Island, but in the national media. The corporate reformers seem shocked when anyone questions their narrative. They see no downside to their dogmatic belief in closing schools and firing principals and teachers, nor to their dogmatic faith that higher test scores are the goal of education. They accuse critics of "defending the status quo," even though it is they who are the status quo, the champions of get-tough accountability. They don't understand that they might be wrong, that their critics deserve a hearing, and that disagreement is healthy..."

"In a bare-bones basement office in Buffalo, N.Y., Katie Campos, an education activist, is plotting a revolution. She and her minuscule staff of the advocacy group Buffalo ReformED are against incredible odds. In less than a week, they are trying to get a controversial law known as the "parent trigger" through the New York legislature. It's a powerful nickname for game-changing legislation that would enable parents who could gather a majority at any persistently failing school to either fire the principal, fire 50% of the teachers, close the school or turn it into a charter school."

"Most teachers and principals will tell you that non-instructional school staff can make a big difference in school performance. Although we may all know this, it's always useful to have empirical research to confirm it, and to examine the size and nature of the effects. In this paper, economists Scott Carrell and Mark Hoekstra put forth one of the first rigorous tests of how one particular group of employees - school counselors - affect both discipline and achievement outcomes. The authors use a unique administrative dataset of third, fourth, and fifth graders in Alachua County, Florida, a diverse district that serves over 30,000 students. Their approach exploits year-to-year variation in the number of counselors in each school - i.e., whether the outcomes of a given school change from the previous year when a counselor is added to the staff."

Early in the life of No Child Left Behind, one amateur but insightful futurist on the Shanker Institute Board remarked to me: "Well, if you tie teacher pay, labeling failing schools, and evaluations of teachers and principals all to student test results-guess what?-you'll get student test results. But some 20, years down the road when these kids get out of high school, we may discover they don't know anything." 

A slew of organizations representing colleges and universities have lined up to oppose a recently introduced federal teacher- and principal-training bill, urging the the chairman and ranking Republican on the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee not to support the proposal.

This NEPC Policy Memo presents the text of a letter from Drs. Burris and Welner to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The letter was invited by Secretary Duncan during a phone conversation with Dr. Burris. It offers concrete guiding principles for evaluation of educators and suggestions for a way forward.

"I don't know where I would be today if my teachers' job security was based on how I performed on some standardized test." That was actor Matt Damon talking to thousands of teachers, parents, principals, school board members and other education activists who stood today for hours in 90-plus-degree temperatures near the White House to protest the standardized testing mania that is at the heart of the Obama administration's school reform policies.

A practice once embraced by legislators to keep high-quality teachers and principals in their schools is coming under fire as a spate of laws have passed to restrict "double dipping" among educators.

Never before have so many had so much reason to cheat. Students' scores are now used to determine whether teachers and principals are good or bad, whether teachers should get a bonus or be fired, whether a school is a success or failure.

More than 1,900 city teachers let go by their principals because of budget cuts are still looking for new jobs this fall - and continue to receive salaries while they're assigned to work as subs and look for permanent positions within the school system.

This was written by George Wood, principal of Federal Hocking High School in Stewart, Ohio, who this year is also taking on the role of superintendent of his small school district. He is executive director of the non-profit Forum for Education and Democracy, a collaboration of educators from around the country.